Trapped Under Ice
by npeg
Summary: A cry-fest one-shot, featuring man-out-of-time Steve Rogers. Get your tissues ready, it'll make you weep like a baby!


Trapped Under Ice

_A/N: This is what happens when I find myself awake in__ the wee small hours of the morning, __a cry-fest one-shot, featuring man-out-of-time, sad and lonely Steve Rogers.  
I apologise for the angsty feels but I couldn't help myself :3_

"Come now Captain, the others call for us!" A raucous cheer rings down the hallway towards Steve's retreating back, as Thor takes him by the shoulder. "We must drink to celebrate our great victory over those puny raptor-men and their perplexing, vile lizard steeds!" roars the swaying Thunder god, spilling beer from a tankard that looked suspiciously like a sawn-off metal bin. "Come", he says, chiding, "it would not do to begin without you!" A huge hand clamps down harder on Steve's shoulder, and for a moment he appears to sag under the sudden weight. But instead, Steve prises Thor's hand away, one huge finger at a time, and makes his excuses. They sound even feebler as they leave his mouth than they had in his head.

"No thanks big guy, I think I'll, uh... I think I'll sit this one out. Not really in the mood for, y'know, loud noises... and, uh, well. I'm not great with parties," he pauses, "and also, people. Lots of people. Y'know, crowds just don't really… Plus the fact I can't get drunk anyway…" He's rambling. He presses his fingers to his eyes and exhales in a slow, patient sigh. Thor raises a large, blonde eyebrow, perplexed by the waffling Captain and mind wandering back to thoughts of more delicious Midgardian beer…

Steve heaves another sigh, and with a sad half-smile, pats the heavily protesting Norse god on the arm and tells him "Maybe some other time?" Then, despondent, he retreats down the corridor towards his room.

The truth is, Steve is just so damned tired. Down to his bones, and further.

He gets like this sometimes. Quiet, listless. The team must have noticed, but they're good enough not to say anything about it. Part of him wishes they would. The rest is silently grateful they don't. There are times when something catches him off guard and he remembers; it all comes rushing back to meet him. Pouring over him like a sheet of ice water; ice that he hates so much he has tremors and nightmares and wakes up shaking in the dark, mouth contorted in a soundless 'o' at the agony of remembering. His life, his past, the war, Bucky, Peggy.. He misses everything. The world has changed so much, but then again, has it really changed it all? The battle has been fought, the war is won, and the carnage is over. His war is just a memory, a lesson to be learned from. And yet, with a sad accompanying ache, he feels that they have learnt nothing at all. What _exactly_ is different about _this_ world? Sure, there are the 30 years of cultural references that he knows deep down he will never be able to catch up on, but that is so very, very far from the point. He could watch reruns of classic TV shows from dusk 'til dawn for the rest of his life, however long that may be, and he would still feel _wrong_. Out of touch, out of time. Surrounded by people, always, and still all alone in his thoughts. Trapped in ice, stuck in the chasm between _his _time, the time he belonged to, and this strange, bright, new world. A world of instant gratification, lights, endless background noise and static, constant streams of information buzzing on superfast highways. The things they could do with _electricity_ these days. With so much history and so much progress in such a short period of time just thinking about how much he had missed leaves him breathless, dizzy, and above all, it hurts.

Some days, some quiet nights, he just feels like he will _never_ understand. And this drags up the now-familiar feelings of separation, of disparity, of utter loneliness because he is _wrong_. He is in the _wrong time_. Good old-fashioned American that he is, and old-fashioned by default, he cannot bring himself to trust the technology whizzing and ticking along around him, ever-present just under the surface of everything.

Some days Steve just wants to hide. To take his sketchbook out of the chest pocket it always resides in, and take off to somewhere that _hadn't_ changed. Surely there must be somewhere that was left untouched by the years he had been, well, _gone_?

Such thoughts as these are heavy, and they hurt him. They are a constant ache behind his eyes. They hover, buzzing around skull, and he can never shake them, nor can he shake the emptiness, the feeling of utter brutal displacement they inevitably conjure during those awful quiet moments.

He stares at the stars sometimes. On still, cold nights he looks up. They are the same stars, more or less. And he is the same man, more or less. But he is less because they are gone; his family, his friends. Their pain, their fear, their joy. Everything they were is gone. He has only memories. And even when he wakes screaming in the night at the terrors of the war and his own loneliness, his sheer _emptiness_, he can feel the memories slipping. Sliding ever closer to oblivion. And if he loses the memories, he loses them; Peggy, and Bucky, and all the others whose names and faces are fading to grey.

And so he grasps at fragile wisps of the nothingness his memories are becoming. And the fabric slips through his fingers as he lies alone, shaking, cold and raw in the night. Dreaming of ice and darkness, of a conversation unfinished, hanging ever-incomplete, a whisper across the stars. Broken and frozen in time.

And curled in the middle of a bed so large he could never fill it, under 1000-count Egyptian cotton sheets, in a house not his own, he feels it so keenly.

He is alone.

_Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters!_


End file.
